Codes workers will keep stipends

Wednesday

Sep 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMSep 30, 2009 at 1:54 PM

Mayor David Roefaro signed an agreement recently to allow codes department employees to keep thousands of dollars in stipends.

DAN MINER

Seventeen codes workers will be allowed to keep the thousands of dollars in stipends they mistakenly were paid over the summer, despite the fact they didn’t meet the inspection fees total originally required.

The extra funds, which were paid July 31, weren’t supposed to be distributed unless the workers raised $125,000 in commercial inspection fees by Sept. 30. Comptroller Michael Cerminaro said in August the workers would have to give the money back after the payroll error.

But that never happened. And the city only has collected $63,085 in fines so far, although more have been billed, officials said.

Still, the city Board of Estimate and Apportionment last week unanimously approved dropping the required fees revenue to $43,750 due to the fact the city earlier this year decreased the rate at which those fees were billed.

“If you lower the fees number, then you have to go back and change everything affected by those fees,” Utica Mayor David Roefaro said. “This has nothing to do with the stipends.”

Officials on both sides of the negotiation say the agreement has been debated since the Common Council acted to lower the fees by 65 percent earlier this year.

“Before they received their stipend payment, I was already talking with the administration and everything about them lowering that fee,” said Steven Price, president of the Civil Service Employees Association, which represents the codes employees. “The whole process was in the works long before they received their stipend.”

But in August when the early payments became public, no officials spoke about the effort to lower the threshold. Roefaro said at the time the stipends should be paid back immediately.

“If they don’t make the threshold they gotta make it up,” he said. “We can’t give them anything they don’t earn.”

The stipends — which were $1,500 for 13 codes inspectors and $750 for four clerical employees — originally were approved by E&A members in January.

The stipends

Cerminaro found out about the payment mistake on Aug. 17 after a reporter called him. One day later, he sent a memo to all 17 codes employees asking for them to pay the money back or it would be taken out of subsequent paychecks.

But First Assistant Corporation Counsel Charles Brown called Cerminaro to say he could not do so and to wait on taking action because the city and collective bargaining union representing the codes employees were discussing the issue.

“You can’t just take money out of people’s paychecks,” Brown said. “It’s got to be a court order or something authorized by law like government withholdings.”

On Sept. 23, Deputy City Engineer Michael Mahoney, Common Council President William Morehouse, Cerminaro and Common Councilwoman Joan Scalise, D-4, all voted in favor of the new agreement.

Roefaro, who also is an E&A board member, was not at the meeting, though he did sign the agreement the next day.

The vote

Despite his “yes” vote a week earlier, Morehouse was unaware of the agreement when the O-D contacted him Wednesday. After reviewing it, he called back to criticize the agreement.

“Are we just doing it … because we already paid them?” he said. “Or are we just paying them because we changed the rate?”

Morehouse said he took responsibility for not understanding what he was voting on and pledged to pay more attention in the future. He said he likely would have voted against the agreement if he had it to do over again.

Scalise said she voted for the agreement as a matter of fairness because the council had altered the fees. She said she did not believe there was a connection between the early payments and the agreement.

“I thought it never should have been paid out, but when I asked questions that was not a factor in the union renegotiating the contract,” Scalise said. “They showed me the figures where there was no way they could meet it with the fees, so I had to take the responsibility for what I had been part of doing.”

Cerminaro agreed.

“When the agreement was signed it was signed at a much higher revenue-producing rate,” Cerminaro said. “It’s much fairer now. Much fairer.”

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